Majorana

Majorana may refer to:

Majorana (surname)

Majorana is an Italian surname. Notable people with the surname include:

See also

MAJORANA

The MAJORANA project (styled Majorana) is an international effort to search for neutrinoless double-beta (0νββ) decay in ⁷⁶Ge. The project builds upon the work of previous experiments, notably those performed by the Heidelberg–Moscow and IGEX collaborations, which used high-purity germanium (HPGe) detectors, to study neutrinoless double-beta decay.

The first stage of the project is the Majorana Demonstrator, designed to demonstrate the technique and evaluate a ton-scale experiment.

Cryostats housing up to 40 kg of natural and enriched germanium detectors are being deployed in low-background vacuum cryostats, underground at the Sanford Underground Laboratory in Lead, South Dakota. Following the Demonstrator, the collaboration intends to merge with the GERDA collaboration to build a much larger experiment.

Physics

The goal of the project is to search for 0νββ decay in ⁷⁶Ge using HPGe detectors. Observation of 0νββ would establish that the neutrino is a Majorana particle and demonstrate violation of lepton number conservation, validating the seesaw mechanism as the explanation for the neutrino mass scale. It would also place constraints on the absolute neutrino mass.